


Choke

by seekingsquake



Series: Drunk on Love [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anxiety, Betty Ross has Issues, Bruce Banner Has Issues, Depression, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Sexual Choking, abusive romantic relationship, alternative universe - no powers, dysfunctional romantic relationship, elements and implications of non-con, implications of Bruce Banner's sad backstory, implied PTSD, sexual and emotional masochism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 20:58:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4639983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"...it's been so long. So long since he could take a breath without burning his lungs and hating himself."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choke

**Author's Note:**

> ***Please be careful when reading this fic. I've tried to tag appropriately. This piece was difficult for me to write, is full of sensitive content, and has the potential to be extremely triggering. Please take care of yourselves. This is not a happy piece at all, so don't push yourself if you're feeling sensitive or unstable. If you do read it and feel like there are things that could be more appropriately tagged/things that I missed that should be tagged, please please please let me know.***
> 
> All characters are property of Marvel. I don't own a thing.  
> Please do not repost or reupload this piece anywhere without consent. If you ask, I'm sure we can work something out.

When she laughs, it feels like sunlight on his skin after weeks of lurking in the basement labs, studying and fretting. When she kisses him, it feels like a cold drink of water after pushing his body way too far. When she says those three little worlds, it feels like fireworks going off in his bloodstream, like bombs behind his eyes destroying all rational thought and shaking him right down to the core. He’s never felt anything this intense ever, never felt alive like this before. He wonders how he made it twenty years in life without actually ever living at all.

She initially introduces herself as Elizabeth, and when they meet her hair is short and blonde. Her eyes are the bluest he’s ever seen, she’s slim and waifish, and she actually hates wearing pants. She almost exclusively wears skirts of varying lengths and fit, with the occasional dress thrown in just to keep Bruce on his toes. She adorns her hair with various barrettes and headbands, ribbons and clips, because she likes the act of taking them out before fucking. Likes how boys watch her as she puts them back in after.

She grew up with a dead mother and absentee father, so Bruce doesn’t mind that she needs to almost obsessively be the centre of attention now. He’s got his own set of nearly neurotic tendencies that she indulges, so he guesses that they’re even.

After his twenty first birthday and just over a year of dating, she asks him to call her Betty and then bundles him into her car and drives him down to the river. It’s cold enough that she’s wearing woollen leggings under a knit dress, boots, a scarf, a knit hat, and a heavy jacket, cold enough that there’s about three inches of snow on the ground, but not cold enough to be any sort of deterrent. When Betty gets an idea, nothing can stop her. She’s got a blanket, a bottle of red wine, and a pair of binoculars, and she parks the car at the edge of the river and drapes the blanket over the hood.

“C’mere,” she says to him, and he settles down beside her.

They drink and look at the stars and tell each other stories of lives that have never belonged to them, and when they kiss it’s decedent and bitter and better than ever before. She sips from the bottle and he drinks from her lips, and she tugs off his gloves so he can rub her over the wool of her leggings. She grinds her hips against his hand, pulls him close, whispers, “I wanted to see the sky, but you’re the most beautiful thing here,” and it feels like he’s been gut punched since he can’t fucking breathe.

“I love you.”

It’s these sort of declarations that make Betty laugh. “Just kiss me, doofus.”

He does what she says because he’s calmer when she directs him, grounds him, and it’s no hardship, really, to indulge in her mouth.

He doesn't know how or when Betty gets him back into the car, but they're twisted together in the back seat and making love between pushed aside but not completely removed layers of clothing. He's never been drunk before, but his head is fuzzy and she is perfect and everything feels good.  

And then he comes down.

*

By spring her hair is long and dark, her nails are always painted red, and she's swapped the clips and ribbons for messy buns and loose braids. They have sex for hours, go to dinner, and then don't speak for a week, in cycles.

"She likes to have time to herself, to do her own thing," he says when Tony asks about it.

"You know that I understand that," Tony argues, "I just think it's weird that she doesn't even answer your texts."

Bruce tries not to think about it. He smokes a lot when she isn't around, since it feels sort of pathetic to drink alone. He smokes and works on his thesis and pretends that he isn't obsessively checking his phone, waiting for her to be ready to want him again. She always ends up wanting him again. It's maybe an unconventional way to run a relationship, but it works for them.

She says, "I don't want to us to feel like we're suffocating each other, you know?" as she presses opened mouthed kisses against his clavicle. "I never want us to get bored of each other."

He hums his agreement and lets her have her way with him, ignores the looks Tony gives him when he sees the bruises on his back and chest when they go to the pool. She likes to hit and scratch and bruise, likes to draw his orgasms out so slowly that he's shaking and incoherent when she's done. She likes to be in charge and he likes that about her. He likes the way that she makes him feel so inside his body, and the few times that it's gotten to be too much, she held him and told him that he was beautiful and perfect and everything she ever wanted.

They get into an argument that culminates in mutual name calling and her manhandling him down onto his bed. He doesn't want to fuck but he doesn't want her to be mad at him anymore, so he let's her take what she wants from him and is both relieved and embarrassed when his cock proves to be very okay with the situation. She comes, drags him over the edge, and then starts to sob.

He's shaking apart at the seams, afraid and confused and more anxious than he's been in a handful of years, but Betty doesn't put him back together this time. She gets dressed, still crying, and apologizes before letting herself out. She doesn't kiss him goodbye. She doesn't speak to him for over a month.

He doesn't know what he did wrong.

*

"I'm so sorry," she whispers into his hair as he curls into her and hides his face against the side of her neck. "I'm so sorry, Babe."

His breath is coming in ragged gasps and his face is wet with tears. "You can't do that," he mumbles, his voice muffled by her skin. "You can't do that to me again. You can't just walk away. I didn't know if you were coming back, if I did some-,"

"Shut up," she tells him sternly. "You didn't do anything wrong. I just... I shouldn't have left. I'm so sorry. It won't happen again. I'll do better. I... I started going to counselling."

He looks up at her for the first time since she showed up at apartment. "What?"

Betty smiles. "I'm seeing a therapist. I want to. I want to be better for you."

He wants to tell her that she doesn't need to be better, that he already loves her the way that she is, but she seems excited and he doesn't want to undermine that.

*

For the most part, the violence in their lives ebbs out. They still fight like they want to hurt each other, fight like every little thing is the end of the world, but no more bruises bloom over his ribs or down his back. Sometimes her thumbs still leave little black smudges in the hollow of his throat, but he still likes the weight of her hand there, still likes the shortness of breath and the fuzzy feeling that comes with it. Likes that a lot more than he likes the taste of wine on her tongue.

The therapy isn’t helping her, not really. It’s just changing the direction of her destruction. Betty grew up angry and alone, and that’s something that calls to Bruce and echoes back to her. But since she’s given up drawing it out of his body, she’s taken to drowning it in her own. They drink a whole bottle of wine between them every Friday night, she has a splash of orange juice with her vodka at breakfast, shots before bed to help her sleep, strong caesars with lunch and stronger martinis at dinner. She floats around in a boozy sort of haze, and it keeps her mellow and pliant right up until something lights her fuze and she turns into a red hot rage ball.

She goes to parties and gets sloppy horny drunk, fucks guys named Glen and Leonard, and Bruce just trails behind her, trying to keep up but never quite managing, smoking cigarette after cigarette when he’s too sick to his stomach to stomach another drink.

“I don’t like the way they make you taste,” she slurs as she swats his pack from his hand and drapes herself over his back. It’s a warm night and they’re both sweating. She’d been dancing dirty with another guy, but had been making eyes at him across the room like _you know who I’m going home with, you know what I’m going to give you_. He’s still hot under the collar. He wants to say _I don’t like the way it makes you taste_ when he feels her swallow a swig of something against his back, but he holds his tongue. He’s so drunk that his thoughts are dark pits and his tongue is choked off. He tries to speak, but can’t work it out.

His body must tremble because she slips around to his front, looks him right in the eye, and says, “You’re slipping. Let’s get home.”

He’s grateful that even when she’s wasted she can feel his anxiety through the haze of everything else.

When they get home they tumble into bed and she holds him through his tremors. He has nightmares and he wakes up drenched in sweat and suffocating on a scream, but she’s right there. “What triggered you?” she murmurs, smoothing his hair back and massaging his temples.

He never knows for sure. He thinks it’s the way the alcohol on her breath reminds him of the worst days of his life, thinks it’s the way she flourishes under the attention of others while all he can do is wilt and watch her, thinks it’s the way that loving her feels like being broken into a million little pieces but that he just can’t stop the breaking. Thinks it’s the way that he saw Tony on the other side of the room, and his oldest, best friend couldn’t even look him in the eye. He says, “Nothing I can think of. Sorry I woke you,” and clings to her as she falls back to sleep while he doesn’t.

He watches the sun rise through the sheer curtain of her bedroom window, and he lights up a smoke when she makes herself a screwdriver to have with her toast. She glares at the tendrils of smoke curling around his face, but he thinks of his mother and takes a deep drag and ignores everything.

*

He falls to pieces for the tenth time in half as many months, and she gets him drunk and fucks him hard just to stop his panicked babbling. She doesn’t know what to do, how to help, and he can’t form the words to tell her what he needs. “Betty,” he manages as she sinks down onto him and squeezes his throat. “Don’t let me go.”

She rocks against him, grunts with the effort, brushes a feather light kiss over his brow. Squeezes harder. “Does this feel like letting go to you, huh?”

*

They have a fight about everything. The drinking, the smoking, the sex outside of their relationship, the sex they have with each other, Tony, her father, Bruce’s anxiety, Betty’s compulsive need for the spotlight. Her neighbours call the cops after they hear the shattering of a vase she’s thrown at his head, and at the end of everything they decide to rent a house together.

It doesn’t make any sense. Tony tries to talk him out of it. Bruce insists. “We’ll get through this. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” There’s a flash of something in Tony’s eyes, but it’s gone so quickly that Bruce pretends he didn’t see it.

Just because Betty isn’t like Pepper doesn’t mean that she’s not good.

Bruce isn’t anything like Tony, anyway.

*

When she finally walks out on him, it’s because the alcohol is more important than their lives, more important than the fact that they had loved each other once. That he still loves her. He feels like he’s choking but her hand isn’t there, so he doesn’t know how to make it stop. He wakes up in a cold sweat, suffocating on a scream, but she isn’t there to keep him from falling to pieces. He finishes the vodka in the cabinet by mixing it with orange juice and pouring it down the drain.

He doesn’t really feel the passage of time. Maybe she’s been gone for two minutes, maybe she’s been gone for twenty million years.

Maybe she was never here at all.

His phone rings and he ignores it, his door is knocked on and he ignores it, his brain is screaming at him and he ignores that too.

And then Tony is there. Tony is saying, “She’s not coming back,” and, “Let me help you,” and it’s been so long. So long since he could take a breath without burning his lungs and hating himself. So he gets in the car and he holds on. And he comes down.

And he breathes.


End file.
